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The Dick Pic: Harassment, Curation, and Desire The dick pic : harassment, curation, and desire Paasonen, S, Light, BA and Jarrett, K http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2056305119826126 Title The dick pic : harassment, curation, and desire Authors Paasonen, S, Light, BA and Jarrett, K Type Article URL This version is available at: http://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/50984/ Published Date 2019 USIR is a digital collection of the research output of the University of Salford. Where copyright permits, full text material held in the repository is made freely available online and can be read, downloaded and copied for non-commercial private study or research purposes. Please check the manuscript for any further copyright restrictions. For more information, including our policy and submission procedure, please contact the Repository Team at: [email protected]. SMSXXX10.1177/2056305119826126Social Media <span class="symbol" cstyle="Mathematical">+</span> SocietyPaasonen et al. 826126research-article20192019 Article Social Media + Society April-June 2019: 1 –10 The Dick Pic: Harassment, © The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions Curation, and Desire DOI:https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119826126 10.1177/2056305119826126 journals.sagepub.com/home/sms Susanna Paasonen1, Ben Light2 , and Kylie Jarrett3 Abstract The combined rise of digital photography and social media has expanded what might be considered photo worthy. Among the pouting selfies and food stuffs of the day exists the ubiquitous dick pic. The mainstream media generally focuses on dick pics of the unsolicited kind, which, negatively positioned, are commonly associated with heterosexual harassment. Considering the ubiquity of dick pics across apps and platforms, research on the topic nevertheless remains scarce. In this article, we examine the dick pic as an online communicative form, first considering how it manifests the ability to harass and then moving beyond this dominant framing to analysis of contexts where such images are collated, expected, and sought after. Through this analysis of dick pics as figures and actors of harassment, curation, and desire, we demonstrate the simultaneous tenacity and flexibility of their meanings in connection with the dynamics of consent and non-consent, intimacy and distance, and complex circuits of desire. We further address the role of platforms, apps, and app stores, via their community standards and terms of use, in shaping the nature, and presence, of dick pics, and discuss the affective and communicative functions that these affordances serve (or fail to serve). Our analysis of three key modes of engagement with dick pics demonstrates the ambiguity and multiple valences of the phenomenon addressed. Keywords social media, dick pics, humor, harassment, gender, user-generated content With the ubiquity of digital photography, what has been con- Like much sexual social media content, the dick pic is both sidered photo worthy has been expanded to include the commonplace—even ubiquitous—and controversial. everyday, including that which goes beyond its highlights The sharing of dick pics involves gradations of risk con- (Murray, 2008; van House, 2009). Pictures of enjoyed meals, nected to privacy, reputation, and professional status for their pets sleeping, and selfies featuring the accessories of the day producers, recipients, and distributors alike. As listed by the are both documented and shared on social media platforms in male lifestyle magazine, Crave, both female and male health ways that have given rise to novel visual ecologies (see care professionals have lost jobs after taking candid pictures Marwick, 2015; Senft & Baym, 2015). These practices of patients’ genitalia as jokes, men have lost their jobs after involve an extended definition of personal and private pho- accidentally sharing dick pics with colleagues and for docu- tography as it is increasingly practiced through apps with the menting practical jokes involving a penis and the preparation default intention of sharing. of fast food (Henry, 2016). Since the circulation of such pri- Meanwhile, photo worthiness itself remains subject to vate shots fills the criteria for harassment, they have also interpretation and occasional debate, from the distribution of invited corporate and sometimes police intervention. In drunken party photos (Lyons, Goodwin, Griffin, McCreanor, many popular media narrative, dick pics are construed as & Barnes, 2016) to naked selfies (Ringrose & Harvey, 2015; problematic, risky, and even dangerous. Meanwhile, in Salter, 2016). This is the case with the phenomenon of dick pics, a common genre of user-generated visual content involv- 1University of Turku, Finland ing the display of male genitalia. The Urban Dictionary iden- 2 University of Salford, UK tifies the dick pic as “a wordless suggestion of intercourse.” 3Maynooth University, Ireland Yet, despite being defined as straightforward invitations for sexual intimacy, the aims and purposes of dick pics often Corresponding Author: Ben Light, School of Health and Society, University of Salford, Salford, M6 remain obscure to their recipients: the reactions they generate 6PU, UK. certainly do not all revolve in positive affective registers. Email: [email protected] Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). 2 Social Media + Society relation to their ubiquity across apps and platforms, research dynamics around which contemporary debates on dick pics on dick pics remains scarce. Existing studies (see Ringrose revolve. & Lawrence, 2018; Salter, 2016; Tiidenberg, 2014, 2016; Tiidenberg & Gómez Cruz, 2015; Vitis & Gilmour, 2016; Harassing Dicks Waling & Pym, 2017) have considered them as part of the panoply of practices associated with online misogyny and In the framework of heterosexual encounters, unsolicited harassment, in connection with sexting practices where their dick pics are framed as toxic, invoking shivers of horror, purposes can be confusing and their social resonances trou- fear, or disgust in their unwilling recipients (Waling & Pym, bling, as evoking humorous feminist responses, as well as in 2017). Given their focus on encounters of the unsolicited terms of the possibilities for the construction of positive kind, media accounts of women engaging with dick pics in body image. positive or even neutral ways are rare. The same applies to As this diversity of approaches already suggests, the dick pic scholarship where images emerging from mutual exchange is not phenomenologically one singular thing, but rather catches or visual play as desired objects of heterosexual titillation are and orients attention of varying qualities, and establishes diverse rarely addressed (Ringrose & Lawrence, 2018 is a notable relationships between the senders and receivers of these images. exception). Disconnected from female desire, dick pics are Dick pics combine the self-shooting practices of selfie culture associated with harassment, appearing alongside negative with some of the visual codes and capacities of pornography. social media comments, revenge porn, and gender-based Distributed in one-to-one, one-to-many, and even many-to- hate speech as a dimension of the Internet’s toxic technocul- many communication networks, they are by default subject to tures (Massanari, 2017; Vitis & Gilmour, 2016). Understood degrees of semantic flexibility and affective openness. The issue in this vein, a self-made image of the penis functions as a at stake would not, therefore, be merely disagreements over figure of phallic male power connected to a fundamental lack what may or may not be photo worthy, appropriate for sharing, of sexual safety experienced by women online. Such an obscene or risky in terms of one’s public reputation. It is equally image serves as an online variation of cat calling: in both one of regimes of desirability involved in bodily exposure and instances, the men involved may frame their actions as a the social norms connected to gender, sexuality and sociability. compliment taking the form of sexual interest, yet these nev- Dick pics move in and across different frames of interpretation ertheless fail to be recognized as such. shaped by the affective registers of, for instance, shame, desire, Social media is replete with celebrated accounts of women disgust, interest, amusement, and aggression. These interpreta- reacting to dick pic harassment. In one such widely reported tive frames, both tenuous and flexible, are drawn according to incident of 2016, Samantha Mawdsley received through the dynamics of consent and non-consent; intimacy and dis- Facebook Messenger an unwanted dick pic from a stranger tance; as well as those relating to the circuits of desire and revul- and reacted by bombarding the man with equally unsolicited sion that galvanize encounters between different bodies. They dick pics in return. After the exchange was through, she pub- are also constituted in dialogue with the platform or service licly shared the message thread with the man’s name and where dick pics circulate, its community standards and terms of image intact: use, as well as the communicative functions that such pics may serve within
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